Hutcheson was exactly the stamp of man fitted to stir and mould the
thought of the young. He was, in the first place, one of the most
impressive lecturers that ever spoke from an academic chair. Dugald
Stewart, who knew many of his pupils, states that every one of them
told of the extraordinary impression his lectures used to make on
their hearers. He was the first professor in Glasgow to give up
lecturing in Latin and speak to his audience in their own tongue, and
he spoke without notes and with the greatest freedom and animation.
Nor was it only his eloquence, but his ideas themselves were rousing.
Whatever he touched upon, he treated, as we may still perceive from
his writings, with a certain freshness and decided originality which
must have provoked the dullest to some reflection, and in a bracing
spirit of intellectual liberty which it was strength and life for the
young mind to breathe. He was not long in Glasgow, accordingly, till
he was bitterly attacked by the older generation outside the walls of
the College as a "new light" fraught with dangers to all accepted
beliefs, and at the same time worshipped like an idol by the younger
generation inside the walls, who were thankful for the light he
brought them, and had no quarrel with it for being new. His immediate
predecessor in that chair, Professor Gershom Carmichael, the reputed
father of the Scottish Philosophy, was still a Puritan of the
Puritans, wrapt in a gloomy Calvinism, and desponding after signs that
would never come. But Hutcheson belonged to a new era, which had
turned to the light of nature for guidance, and had discovered by it
the good and benevolent Deity of the eighteenth century, who lived
only for human welfare, and whose will was not to be known from
mysterious signs and providences, but from a broad consideration of
the greater good of mankind--"the greatest happiness of the greatest
number." Hutcheson was the original author of that famous phrase.